He met her gaze. “Pardon?”
She gestured around them. “You’ve been here for a decade. Tell me what you’ve learned. Maybe I can assist you in finding a treatment.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. She wanted to help. Aftereverything he’d done—failing to disclose his physical limitations before luring her to Scotland, rejecting her in the library when she’d been so earnest, causing her family to disavow her very existence.
He did not deserve her.
“I…I believe it is some manner of illness,” he said. One unique to his species, although he would have to find a different way of approaching that subject. “I haven’t identified the cause, although I suspect it is my diet.” That would explain why none of his siblings were similarly afflicted. They subsisted on human blood. He’d never been more tempted to give up his prohibition, but each time he considered taking Smith up on his offer, he remembered the gurgling sound of his father dying after Marcus had torn out his throat in his fledgling rage.
“You said the attacks started after you were heckled?” Winifred asked.
He nodded, even as memories of blood-spattered windows and the cackling laughter of his gleeful maker crowded his thoughts.
She shoved to her feet and began pacing the room. “Consider theTusculanae Disputationes. Cicero distinguished between worry regarding the future and a burst of emotion.Angor. In Latin, suffocation.” She waved her hands, as if lecturing in front of an entire hall of students. “There are records of animals fleeing Helike in the days before a significant earthquake. To the citizens of the city, that behavior would have seemed irrational, until it wasn’t.”
Her sudden enthusiasm was amusing enough that it succeeded where he’d failed and banished the unpleasant echoes of his past to the depths of his mind. “What does my condition have to do with ancient Greece?”
She continued as if she hadn’t heard him, walking faster as she spoke, as if growing excited by her theories. “The event itself wouldn’t precipitate the attack. No, it would be anticipation. If we could interruptthe association—”
He caught her hand as she crossed his path for the fifth time. “Winifred. Slow down.”
She blinked several times before smiling ruefully. “I apologize. When I get fascinated by a problem, I lose track of everything around me. What I am trying to say is, have you considered your attacks are a symptom of an illness not of the body, but of the mind?”
“I-I had not,” he said, which was the truth. He did not want to offend her by dismissing her theory outright, but he could not believe any soul that had lived as long as he had could develop something as simple as a neurosis.
“You’re skeptical,” she said. “I can see it on your face.” She put her hands on his shoulders. “But you’ve been at this for a decade. Give me a chance, Marcus. Let me try to help. My uncle won’t listen to me, which means you are the only chance I have of ever seeing my cousin again. I need you healthy and able to fight, if need be.”
His eyes burned with tears, but he refused to blink and let them fall. After so many years of trying to be like Marguerite and holding everything he felt tightly inside, he was no longer sure how to express emotion in a way that she would understand. He leaned his head so his icy cheek rested atop her warm fingers.
“As you wish.”
Chapter Fourteen
Winifred crossed herarms as she surveyed the bulging sacks slouched in the chairs that surrounded the narrow oak table she’d had the servants haul into the music room. “They don’t look enough like people.”
She’d considered using the dining hall, but it was far too cavernous. She needed Marcus to hear her without having to shout.
When she figured a way out of her uncle’s decree and wrote to Felicity, she would leave out the details of this night. Her cousin would surely laugh if Winifred described her music room set for a formal dinner, except with the contents of the cook’s pantry standing in for guests.
The butler, Gillanders, the housekeeper’s husband, she’d learned, cleared his throat. “Hats, perhaps, my lady?”
Unlike Marcus’s valet, Smith, Gillanders was a stout man with light-blond hair and a finely trimmed moustache. He spoke with a soft, reassuring voice and the skin around his eyes and mouth crinkled when he smiled, which was often.
She grinned. “That will do nicely.”
As he left, Winifred walked to the nearest seat and plumped a bag of barley. Keeping busy helped her avoid thinking about the fact that she might never see her cousin again because of a feud Marcus insisted he knew nothing about. What she needed to do was have him speak to her uncle about the matter, as Uncle Ethan was much more likely to listen to a man than his own niece. Unfortunately, she doubted heruncle would make a return visit, which meant Winifred had to bring her husband to London.
Except Marcus couldn’t leave the castle.
If there had never been a rivalry, as Marcus claimed, then that was the first problem she had to solve. He was so determined to find a solution to his attacks through scientific means, but the new knowledge she’d gained after spending the morning in the library made her believe a more effective approach could involve the principles of Hellenistic philosophy. In particular, a technique described by the Roman Stoic Seneca that involved focusing on the present when in periods of distress to maintain calm. Seneca also believed that suffering was necessary for growth, but that one should not become unhappy before a crisis arrived, as nothing in life was guaranteed.
Marcus had admitted that even thinking about going outside caused an immediate and powerful reaction. As she could not control his thoughts, she had to find a different way of eliciting the precise amount of stress necessary to bring on an attack without overwhelming him. After questioning him at length about what situations caused him anxiety, she’d chosen the easiest to replicate.
A dinner party.
Gillanders returned with several giggling maids carrying hat boxes. Winifred chose three to grace the “heads” of her guests. It was difficult getting them to remain in place, and she had to have a footman lash a few to their chairs to keep them from slouching, but it would have to do. She even chose a few necklaces from her jewelry box and draped them around the necks of the “ladies.”
“What do you think?” she asked when she finished. Mrs. Gillanders looked ready to burst into laughter while her husband remained as silent and still as a statue. Only the faint twitching of his silver-speckled mustache gave away his mirth.
